Network assistance information may be useful to allow a network to optimize the network signaling load and/or the power consumption of one or more mobile terminals. Network assistance information may be a combination of information regarding the user activity status and data characteristics. With respect to the user activity status, the network assistance information may include information indicating whether the user is actively utilizing the mobile terminal and, if so, the applications actively utilized by the user and/or information regarding the activity of the mobile terminal over the air interface. With respect to the data characteristics, the network assistance information may include information regarding packet inter-arrival time, quality of service (QoS) requirements, etc.
As noted above, the network may find the network assistance information to be useful in order to, for example, optimize the network signaling load and/or to optimize the power consumption of one or more mobile terminals. In this regard, the network assistance information may allow the network to optimize decisions relating to the setting of a radio resource control (RRC) connection release timer and specific configurations for a mobile terminal, such as the mobile terminal discontinuous reception (DRX) configuration. Notwithstanding the utility of network assistance information, frequent signaling of the network assistance information from a mobile terminal to the network may disadvantageously increase the signaling overhead, thereby potentially reducing or eliminating performance gains that might otherwise be achieved by the network and/or the mobile terminal based upon utilization of the network assistance information.